I tend to use cheap beer or any equally tasteles soft alcoholic beverage (sake in my opinion is a better option) when I want to get advantage of the faster dissipation of them. Water tends to take longer to boil and, in the case of my city where tap water is hard, also tends to change the flavour of anything cooked into it.

If flavouring is also a point, White Wine or any cheap Cava or Champagne do wonders on unbrined chicken (I cannot use much salt for health reasons), without killing any taste it can have by itself. If you don't care about the original taste, then red wine, or even better, a 50/50 mix of Jerez Dulce and Jerez Seco (I think they call it Sherry Wine in english), or any strong, dark beer will do. In a meat with such a subtle flavor such as chicken meat, this process will practically erase any traces of its flavor and aroma, and it will replace it with the ones of our alcohol of choice, plus of the any spice we add to the mix.

There are also spice that nullify the flavor of the chicken, but that's an entirely different subject

(sorry for my extrange grammar; it's not quite the same write tech reports than write about cooking...)

Call me crazy, but I think Guiness-flavored chicken sounds perfectly nasty. Its also amusing to hear people confuse their subjective personal preferences (e.g. Guiness is "better" than Bud) for objective qualities.

I have done this many times here at my house with mexcian beer, and this is what i have found:

tecate = so so taste
pacifico = great taste
modelo = acceptable

i also put clove, red pepper and parsil on the cerveza and put only butter and black pepper on the chicken and cover it with a metal cube-like stuff and seti it on the charcoal, and put some of it above so the heat covers all, after like 1.5 its done and tastes terrific.

I wrote the book Zen and the Art of Cooking Beer-Can Chicken: The Definitive Guide (www.redowlpublications.com).

In the course of writing the book, I had the pleasure of trying a host of beers, wines, soda pops, juices...etc as the liquid source in the beer-can or in the liquid resevoir of the infusion cooker (ie: Poultry Pal).

I found that the more hoppy and robust the beer the larger the impact on the flavor of the bird. My best results were achieved using such beers as Rogue's Smokehouse Ale, or Great Divide's Doubled Hopped IPA. Both excellent. At the end of the day, the most significant benefit of the continuous infusion process (beer-can technique) is the continuous flux of moisture which moistens the bird as it cooks and allows the bird to cook a bit faster. If you desire to impart flavor through your liquid medium, you need to use beers such as what I discussed, and/or liquids with a strong aromatic aspect. Either way the continuous infusion process makes for a superlative chicken or turkey.

I just made beer can chicken last night on A Food Year and somebody linked me to this. I found that the chicken tasted different than it would as if it were just cooked regularly, but it was hard to tell how much of that was from the beer, the rub or because it was my first time making it on the grill :o

Haven't tried it, but one recipe I read instructs you to pour off half the beer (or juice or soda--they mention root beer as an interesting alternative) and poke holes in the sides of the can. The liquid is mixed with various spices and put in a spray bottle to baste the chicken periodically as it cooks. Their preferred cooking method was a kettle grill, I believe.

Hi Michael,
I am the inventor of the Poultry Pal cooker used in your test and have worked with Carey Black on beer can recipes. In my experience
the last few years on this subject, use the most flavorful beer or steaming liquid you prefer, that is the great thing of cooking this way --you can still eat your less than perfect results!
Experiment with rubs, spices and liquids till you get what you enjoy!
I will soon be adding an instuctional video on the Poultry Pal web site along with beef / pork roasts and pot pie instructions.
May I also incourage people to try brined turkey on the grill, this beats deep fried hands down!
Thanks and keep cooking in good health,
Tom Simon

The reason that some Belgian beers taste better with aging is that the yeasts often produce some unwanted chemicals that dissipate with age. For example, I recently brewed a Belgian style Trappist ale, and the popular yeast strain that we used produced a rather strong phenolic taste. (That means it tastes like a Band-Aid.) This is a known effect with the yeast, but this taste weakens with time. It wasn't too good to start with, but is getting better. We'll let it age some more if we can stand to wait that long. You're usually waiting for some bad taste to dissipate, rather than a flavor to get better.

There's a lot of misunderstanding of beer terms above, though. A pilsener is a lager. "Lager" refers to a beer fermented at low temperatures, usually with a bottom-fermenting yeast. An ale is also a beer, but fermented at higher temperatures, usually with a top-fermenting yeast.

Belgian beers that can be aged for a long time can be because they are still alive. They contain various microbes and wild yeasts that protect them from the deleterious effects of oxygen in the package. The microorganisms respire any minor amounts of oxygen introduced at packing time. High alcohol content also has a strong preseving effect. Regular single yeast strain, filtered, modern beers do not want the flavours that these microorganisms produce so are out of luck with in-package oxygen defense. Naturally conditioned beers also have this advantage, but the priming yeast is not as long lived as the belgian beer's yeast and bacteria cocktail, and without the other microbes involved to consume the yeast as it dies, a nice beefy marmite flavour eventually develops. Once again high alcohol content can slow this process down remarkably.